Andreas Bergh is associate professor in Economics at Lund university and fellow at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm.

His research concerns the welfare state, institutions, development, globalization, trust and social norms.

He has published in journals such as European Economic Review, World Development, European Sociological Review and Public Choice. He is the author of 'Sweden and the revival of the capitalist welfare state" (Edward Elgar, 2014).

Since the year 2000, at least five major English-language publications (not including textbooks) have taken serious, analytical approaches to all of human history within the confines of a single volume.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto opened this round of publication with Civilizations (2000). Noel Cowen soon followed with a brief essay entitled Global History: A Short Overview (2001). Michael Cook’s Brief History of the Human Race (2003) appeared a few months after the McNeills’ Human Web (also 2003). Finally, David Christian recently published a study entitled Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (2004).

Cowen’s emphasis falls on commonalities of experience: once human societies make a commitment to settlement, agriculture, and theproduction of a surplus, he argues, “there are some common consequences.” [...] The riposte to Cowen’s schema is Fernández-Armesto’s insistently idiographic Civilizations, which argues specifically, pointedly, and repeatedly that there are no determinist principles at work in theworld, rather that history unfolds randomly as the product of human wills intersecting with available resources.